Middle Seat

I made sure I had my passport for customs, my pilot licence in case there was any on-base scrutiny of who I was, and my camera so I could take pictures of anything that wasn't a military secret, and got in the car. I drove across the border to catch a cheap flight south. The customs official looks dubious at my reason for going south, but when he asks my profession a light goes on. I think you can get away with all kinds of crazy stuff on account of being a "commercial pilot." It's like having a Canadian flag on your backpack in Europe.

Check-in is painless. It's nice just carrying overnight stuff and not my massive Arctic-to-Florida work bag. It's coming up to American Thanksgiving, so the flight is chock full and the flight attendants are busy trying to get everyone's bags, coats and butts in the appropriate places. A guy is there with two young kids and they don't have seats together, so the flight attendant was obviously trying to rearrange people to create a row for them. Airline should have taken care of that at the gate before seating people, because now it's more complicated. Passengers were apparently refusing some of the offered seat swaps so it wasn't just as simple as emptying a row of individual travellers and replacing them with the family. I volunteered to move and the FA was pathetically grateful when I accepted a move into a middle seat to make it work out for the family, assuring me that she would comp all my drinks in compensation. It's sort of sad that it was that hard to get people to move over so a little kid could sit with his dad.

I liked my new seatmates better, anyway. My original neighbours were a little girl in the window seat next to me an angular mother who seemed to be checking me out for my propensity to molest little girls. And speaking to, smiling at or acknowledging the presence of counted as molestation. Okay, I'm obviously not being fair there, but I got such a cold vibe from her that I was happy to move to the friendlier spot in between an electrician from Alabama and a woman with elaborately hennaed hands and black-tipped fingers, on her way to her sister's wedding. I slept on the flight, so I can't report on the fascinating things that take place in the back of an airliner. Except that the flaps were filthy. filthier than mine, even.

As we came into land, I could see that North Carolina is a little swampy, with lots of trees, just starting to change colours for the fall. I grabbed my carry-ons and headed for the exit. About this time I realized I hadn't booked a rental car. I meant to. We'd discussed it. You could almost hear the chuckle in John's e-mail as he replied to my enquiry about buses or trains from North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham airport. It seems that North Carolina is not a public transit sort of state. "You'll need to rent a car," he'd explained. And then I neglected to. But never mind. I'm a master of flexibility. I jumped on a rental car shuttle, figure I'd go down the line at the rental car desk, and see who had one to rent me.

It turns out that at RDU all the car rental counters are on the individual companies' lots, so I just have to hope that the one I've reached has cars. I ask the gentleman who greets the van and he just gestures at the parked cars, "pick one." That's right, the cars are all parked with the keys in the ignition and you pick the one you want, drive your car to the exit and do the paperwork right there. Americans are masters of car-related convenience. The checkout clerk looks at my Canadian driver's licence and asks if I speak French. He's Arabic-looking and his nametag identifies him as Abdallah, so he's probably from a former French colony in north Africa. "Not as well as you," I say in English. Yeah. I know: chicken. I should have taken the opportunity to practice a disused skill. When we're done I say thanks and good evening in French. I'm a block away before I realize that I forgot to ask for a map. I hope my approaches in the simulator are better planned than my arrival at the base.

I know I have to go southeast, so I take the option directing me to highway 40 "east," and am lucky enough to find a gas station before I get to the on ramp. But they're all out of maps, and no one has heard of Havelock. A truck driver has a GPS unit for his car and plugs in my destination. It's easy: east on I-40 then east on US-70 and that will take me right into Havelock. I'm on my way.

It's dark for most of the drive, so I can't report on much except that US 70 kept bifurcating into the 70-bypass and 70-business and about half the time I took the wrong one, because I couldn't tell the bypass from the business sign from far away enough to get into the correct lane to make the turn. I stopped to get a map, just in case I missed one of those turns and got lost in the dark. Another customer in the store assured me that it didn't really matter which 70 I took at any point because there were about the same number of lights on either.

I stopped at an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant, the kind with the neon-edged pagoda roof. It had obviously been there a long time, and there were lots of cars in the parking lot, so it couldn't be too bad. And it wasn't. Sesame chicken, broccoli beef and ice cream for dessert, then back on the road.

A bit later my phone rang, and not knowing the local rules about cell phone driving I pulled over into what turned out to be a butcher shop parking lot to return the call. Every time I ask anyone if it's illegal to answer a cellphone while driving in their jurisdiction they say something like "sort of" or "only if they catch you." It looks as if North Carolina is okay with me talking on the cell phone unless I'm a teenager or driving a schoolbus. John is just checking up on me, then calls back again as I get into town and guides me to my hotel so we can go out for coffee.

Plans have changed now. I left out some of the previous plan changes, so suffice to say I am not surprised. The colonel has decided that it is best that I be there in the daytime, which may be good news, because I'll possibly be able to fly with an instructor or a trained pilot, to make better use of the opportunity. And it means I get to sleep in tomorrow. We get gently kicked out of the doughnut shop by the staff who want to go home, and John will call me in the morning to plan our day.

Wait, what? They just advertised a 30 calorie energy drink on TV. (I'm multislacking: blogging while watching TV). Wouldn't I burn 30 calories taking a bottle out of the fridge and removing the lid? How is this useful, unless an athlete has a purple food colouring deficiency?

Intriguing Invitation

Longtime readers may remember John, a reader who helped talk me out of one of my "I don't think I'll blog anymore" phases. He is now working on a military base in North Carolina and some time ago he suggested that he might be able to get me into a simulator to try my hand at flying a KC130. I of course said something along the line of "Wow, thanks, I should do that!" and then never actually did anything about it. Fortunately he's the sort of guy who writes back and says, "Hey, when are you coming down to see the simulator?"

John works in IT. When you consider that a simulated airplane has no engines to leak oil, no landing gear to swing, no wingtips to bash and very little in the way of structure to corrode, most of the maintenance is IT, so he knows one end of it from the other. Originally when we picked this week for our fun, the sim wasn't very busy, but it broke down a while ago and is only just back online so there is a backlog and the working hours are fully booked. We consider postponing, but who is to say that another month will be any better for scheduling, and they are looking at upgrading the airplanes to include classified equipment, which would make the whole simulator classified, and thus certainly off limits to a foreign civilian. But we're not out of luck. There are four hours a day that John gets the sim: it's is scheduled for maintenance from midnight to four a.m. By coming down to use the simulator overnight, I'm gambling that it doesn't actually require maintenance that night, and that I'm just 'helping' John check out all the systems.

So as soon as I've finished my usual unpack/laundry/repack sequence, I'm heading down to North Carolina. I'm going to come for two nights as insurance against it being broken one night. It's a full motion simulator with high fidelity visuals, a HUD for each pilot, and controls and avionics that closely duplicate the actual airplane.

When else would I have a chance to fly a four-engined tanker/transport, even if it all happens inside a box.

My Customers Are Smarter

I've been browsing a website of astonishing customer interactions. I'll give you the link in a moment, but first let me give thanks for my own wonderful customers.

I am very grateful that my customers are sane and aviation savvy. They understand that I can't fly the airplane with something wrong, even if they would drive a truck in the same condition. They recognize the safety value of making conservative decisions. And they have never once taken frustration out on me when the weather, aircraft, regulations, late arriving parts or other aspects of the world mean that a flight has to be cancelled. The frequently change their minds, but my job is to be flexible for them. Occasionally they make decisions that don't seem optimal to me, or reject suggestions that I thought would make their lives easier, but I am able to trust that they are sane and will take responsibility for their decisions.

Sometimes I do charter flights with people less familiar with aircraft, but it's expensive enough to book a charter flight that I seem to be shielded from the customers who lack not only a basic knowledge of the world, but the comprehension and information processing skills to ever learn. This post is dedicated to all the front line customer service people who have no protection against such customers.

All the people I interact with seem to be familiar with basic logic and causality, plus know that airplanes need fuel, airports are noisy, weather can make air travel unpredictable, and amazing as I am I am not superhuman.

The site is Not Always Right. I'll warn you that it's so simultaneously hilarious and jaw-dropping that you may not be able to tear yourself away from it. Here's an aviation example illustrating the principle that some customers don't seem to be able to absorb basic information about the world. It \s also a commonly successful type of response: the person serving the customer finds something to say that satisfies the customer, even when it's not entirely true.

Break Time

The forecast snowstorm never arrived, so the highways stayed clear and our relief shift did arrive. We all sat in one of our palatial hotel rooms and relayed notes about everything that needs continuity. Oil consumption, heater operation, where we're parked, what we think we've lost in the airplane and hope they will find (my memory stick!), the pet peeves of the current client, and the particular radio frequencies we might need.

We have everything packed already, so early the next morning we drove to the nearest international airport to head home for a break. My co-worker has an early flight, so he hops out with his stuff and then I take the car to look around town before my flight. I pull into a tourist info place to get a map of town so I don't get lost, and while I'm there I ask the bored teenager to suggest something to do near here. There does not appear to be a local giant thing to photograph. She picks up a yellow highlighter and marks a few spots on the map where she says there are cafes. That's not a bad idea, but I'd like to see more than the inside of a cafe, so I ask her if there is a good place to go for a walk nearby, seeing as it's such a fine day. She stares at me for a second or two and says "not really." I indicate a couple of green spots on the map, presumably parks and ask about them. She is noncommittal. Having wrung the encounter of all available information, I thank her and get back into the car.

I soon pass a bank with an electronic temperature/time display. It's two degrees outside. Perhaps to most people this isn't beautiful weather for a walk. But it is lovely. Still air, blue sky, birds tweeting.

The first highlighted spot consists of a row of retail stores that don't open for another couple of hours, and a car wash. It occurs to me that if you were a bored teenager who hated her job and everyone who asked you for information, you could tease a tiny thread of entertainment out of your job by sending them to random highlighted spots on the map. It's not like they're going to bother to come back and complain. I myself get more enjoyment out of the speculation that she has done this deliberately than I would have from accurate directions, so I forgive her and park a couple of blocks past the car wash. The map shows a river with green space a few blocks from here so I head towards it. Is there a city with a river running through it that doesn't have walking trails along the banks? Not this one. It's a pretty nice multi-use area with wide paved and narrower unpaved paths. Lots of other people agree with me that it's a nice day for a walk.

There's also a museum on the map, not far away, so I drive over there and see an exhibit on diamonds. Part of the exhibit was just a promotion extolling the virtues of diamond jewellery, but there was a more interesting section on exploration. It turns out that the geologist leading the team that discovered the Diavik mine in the NWT was a woman named Eira Thomas.

And then I get on an airplane and go home.

Digging Out

It's almost a shame to check out of our luxurious rooms, but the snow has truly stopped and the ceiling is sufficient for us to make our escape. The airport shuttle is out of order so we call a cab to get to the airport.

We somewhat regretfully call the after hours number for our hangar contact. It's 8:30 on Sunday morning the day after Hallowe'en and it's a safe bet he wasn't planning on coming in quite this early. He answers though, and says he'll be there in half an hour. He is, and maybe a little bit early. We load our gear, preflight, and confirm that the hangar bill is taken care of. We're ready to go.

Before we can get the airplane out of the hangar, we have to get the other airplanes out, but before we can do that, we have to clear the snow. He has a little Honda tractor, the same one we've been towing airplanes with, fitted with a plough blade. He starts by driving around in an oval pattern, with one straightaway across the ramp entrance of the hangar. We shovel the snow away from the ends and he orbits until there is enough of a clear space immediately in front of the hangar for him to push snow straight away from it. He tows a caravan out and then goes after ours. The beams supporting the roof of the hangar are lower to the sides of the hangar than the middle, and where our airplane is parked the beams are lower than the top of our vertical stabilizer. So how did the airplane get parked back there? Same way as we're going to get it out. The expert hooks up the tow bar, I stand on the rear airstairs and my coworker jumps up and hangs off the horizontal stabilizer. That tips the whole empennage down enough that it will pass under the beam as the tow tractor pulls it. That's not an uncommon procedure. Sometimes they have a concrete block already to hook up to the tail tiedown ring, for the same purpose.

With the airplane outside, we're ready to go. We apologize again for rousing the other pilot on a Sunday morning, and hope that some of the hangar fees we've been paying will find his way into his paycheque. He says he expects it will be reflected in a full employee beer fridge. Ah beer: the Canadian currency of debts that mere money cannot address.

I text the customers with a pessimistic arrival time. There's a low ahead to the south, so I am expecting a headwind or at best a crosswind, and I don't want to be late after they've been waiting for three days. The run-up is uneventful and this time not only is visibility good, but we have an absolutely hammering tailwind. Yeah, tailwind. The low isn't where I thought it was. We're above a very thin layer of cloud that we can see right through and we're going to be an hour ahead of schedule. The customers are going to think we forgot the time change last night.

The very thin layer of cloud thickens a lot, but we still want to be over it. Canadian VFR over the top rules require our destination to be pretty much clear for hours before and after our forecast arrival and there's no weather report or forecast for our destination, so to avoid scud running, we would be obligated to use the GFA, which definitely doesn't forecast such a thing in our area. The nearest station to our destination is currently 11,000 broken, which is just fine, but its TAF is calling for 2000' broken and a mile in snow. So we can't fly above a cloud layer on the basis of that forecast. We have a band of cloud here, ending just to the south, with the winds clearly showing that the low is to the north. So are we rebels to think we're better than the forecast and overfly the cloud layer despite the nasty forecast? Heck no. We'll use a trick the trans-Atlantic carriers do. The ol' file 'n' switch.

So as far as the VFR-over-the-top is concerned, we're going to Regina. We've got the fuel. Regina has a TAF and is wide open. And there is nothing illegal about being on our perfectly legal way to Regina and then landing somewhere else along the way instead. Airlines do the opposite. They can't carry enough fuel for the legal requirement to get all the way from North American points of origin to many European destinations. So they officially fly to London, and then when they have almost reached London, switch over to Berlin, because the excess fuel required to go from London to Berlin is less than from New York to Berlin. You're allowed to file to any airport you please, and you are never restricted from landing early or refiling to anywhere you can legally go.

The clouds below thin out just before top of descent and we descend through the scattered layer without even having to detour to the south as we expected. The airport is easy to find and the plug-ins at transient parking even work, once we reset the circuit breaker. We put on the wing covers, which are the wrong size, but were all along. I remember them from last year. You have to be creative. And you know, based on our flight planning, that we are.

There's a surprisingly lovely pilot lounge with new, matching furniture and a big flat screen TV. It's sort of confusing. Standard pilot lounge decor is the discards from someone else's remodelling.

Then the customers pick us up and take us to an even classier hotel. We thought we were lucky with our upgrade at the last place. Ha! This hotel room is big enough to get lost in. And it's brand new. Almost too bad we're going home as soon as our replacements arrive, probably tomorrow. I have to finish up my paperwork then repack everything so anything sharp or liquid is in my checked bag and anything valuable or fragile is in my carry-on.

A friend of mine just lost a digital camera to someone who had access to her checked luggage, and it's disturbing. Not just in the sense of "damn, I liked that camera and it was expensive" but also in the sense that if they can take something like that out of your suitcase and get it out of the secure area unobserved, what can they put in it?

And This Makes Three

"And those small dots...blockin' our path? I supposed it's too much to hope dat's just snow."

Today is Hallowe'en. It snows all day again. The GFA includes snow, freezing rain, and a gigantic, ugly, trowelly low wrapped around the north. The shape is like a fist with one giant focused finger of weather pointing from here to our destination. We're supposed to be there today starting work. But at least the customers waiting for us will have the same weather, so we couldn't have worked anyway.

The town Hallowe'en fireworks display is cancelled because of the snow. They'll have it next weekend instead, probably. For most Canadians, public fireworks displays are more of a summer thing, like for Canada Day but fireworks work best in the dark, so in the north they save them for winter holidays. Literally save them, as Ottawa gives municipalities grants to celebrate the nation's birthday with fire, but allows northern communities to take the grant and shift it to a more appropriate date. I meet someone from way up north, I can't remember where, who says they let theirs off to celebrate the first sunrise of winter, a tiny peek of the sun on the southern horizon, only lasting a few minutes. I think she said it was in late January.

After nightfall, the snow stops falling and we make plans to get the eight a.m. shuttle to the airport, and fly out of here.

The Forecast Was Right

It snows all day.

Racing the Storm

At seven in the morning the snow has not yet started and the clouds are reported as 2000' scattered. It's still pitch black of course, so we can't peer at the clouds, just refresh the METAR over and over again to make sure a special hasn't reported it worse. The graphical forecast shows a huge area of low visibility and ceilings in snow sweeping to the east along our flight path (yes, company has advised us where we're going next, just in time). The word is yes, we are released.

The hotel shuttle doesn't starts operating until eight. The clients can't really drive us to the airport with our gear before then because they are busy packing their trucks with their gear, and they want to get on the road and get out of here before the snow starts in earnest too. We eat breakfast, go to our rooms for our gear, check out and it's almost eight anyway. A few light snowflakes are falling here and there. It's still good at the next station to the southeast, but they are all forecasting all kinds of miserableness for this afternoon.

We jump on the hotel shuttle, peering at the tiny bit of greyness that is the dawn. The ceiling is probably still coming down. We just need to sneak out from under this cloud before the visibility drops to nothing and we can arc south out of the path of the storm.

At the hangar the locals are there, unloading an airplane we saw them loading yesterday. That sounds productive, but the cargo looks very familiar. Yeah, it's the same cargo. They have a load that was supposed to go northwest; they didn't get through yesterday and they know they aren't getting through today. They put the freezer stuff in the freezer and the fridge stuff in the fridge, then put a pre-made laminated placard on the pallet with the non-perishables "CARGO IN FREEZER/FRIDGE." Good strategy.

We load our own gear in our airplane, secure it all down and get towed out to the apron. The ceiling is now 1500', but it's still not snowing. WE CAN DO IT! All systems are go and we call for taxi. Maybe it should have been a warning sign when it takes three radio calls to correctly specify our intended runway. I won't say who was on the microphone. I'm protecting the dignity of either myself or my sterling coworker. The FSS accepts all three of our choices and we finally depart off the one we meant. There's inbound King Air traffic, but he won't be an issue. We level off just below the cloud deck and head southeast. What I don't like is the lack of a nice clear view of the distance below the bases.

The visibility where we are is fine. It just kind of ends. We descend a bit, but so does the cloud. And the terrain rises here before it falls. We arc a little towards the river and lower ground, but there is no path out of here that meets our safety criteria. We call the FSS back to let them know we are inbound. The GPS says we have gone a total of 7.5 miles, but we retrace our steps and land.

On the taxi back to the hangar I text everyone to let them know we didn't escape. In the time it takes us to shut down, the snow has started. By the time we get to the hotel it's clouds to our elbows and snow to the ends of our noses. We're here for the duration. But can it really snow like this for three days? Sometimes a local forecast calling for three days of snow means three days in which it snows every day, not necessarily three solid days of snow.

Back at the hotel I ask that very question, "Do you think it will snow like this for three days?" There are two clerks at the desk. They don't hesitate, they don't look at each other for confirmation, they both simply nod, solemly, twice. It's like that scene in Fargo where everyone says "Ya."

They understand our plight and are nice to us, letting us check back in even though it's not yet ten in the morning. We say we're happy to have the old rooms back uncleaned, but it doesn't work that way. The rooms we just checked out of have already been stripped but not recleaned so they assign us new rooms. "You'll like them. They're bigger," she says. Ooh. They've been very nice to us. The new rooms are not only bigger but have full kitchens and a fireplace. I put away my luggage then spend an hour alternating between the waterslide and the hot tub in the hotel pool, then turn on the fireplace and snuggle back into bed with my laptop and the TV remote.

There are worse places to be snowed in. I know. I've been to many of them. I e-mail everyone to know we will try again if the snow lets up, but it doesn't. It snows all day.

Impending Snow

We have about four hours worth of work to do and the weather forecast offers us a a little window in which to do it. We're west of Fort Nelson, near where the highway starts to enter the mountains just south of the Yukon border. There is clearly more snow visible on the ground than there was on the last flight, and there is a fine veil of altostratus cloud over our heads. Winds are strong but there is only a little turbulence

Within an hour the mid-level cloud layer is noticeably thicker and lower, and cloud continues to waft in as we fly. A large mass warm air--well not very warm, but warmer than the air mass that's over us now--is slowly travelling east. It abuts the cold bubble of air currently covering the Yukon, and northern BC and Alberta, and as it is warmer it rides up over the present air mass. Same old story: rising air expands; expansion causes cooling; and cooling causes the formation of liquid water droplets, otherwise known as clouds. The incoming warm air mass contains a lot of moisture because it formed over the Pacific Ocean, so there is the potential for a lot of cloud.

Over the course of our four hour flight the ceiling drops three or four thousand feet. The highest mountain peaks to the west have disappeared and we can see spots in the mountains where it's already snowing. The local weather forecast calls for three solid days of serious snow.

We return to the airport for landing and call one last time to refuel. We're scheduled to fly to our next job tomorrow, after the client is certain they no longer need our services here. Of course we're not yet certain where the next job will be, except that it has to be south and east of here. We asked to be released today, so we're not trapped by the incoming snowstorm, but the answer was no, they won't give up their airplane until they know they don't need it anymore. They will let us know that at 7 a.m. tomorrow. We let the hangar people know this, so they can stack our airplane near the front, and we give them instructions on sending the hangar space bill (almost as much as my hotel bill) plus a offer a forwarding address should the wing covers ever arrive. And then in walks someone with a package for us. Just in time. We put it in the airplane and then go back to the hotel to pack up for the move.

Oil and Geekery

It's another bad weather day, but we have some busy work to do, and one of the mission specialists has the time to drive us around. We need oil and some photographs.

We were running W100 oil all summer, but switched to W80 at the last oil change. We would have switched on the one before, but neither I nor the airplane knew we were going north into winter already. While he was doing the maintenance the AME bought two cases (12 L each) of oil, and put 20 L in the engines leaving four over for us to use. The engines aren't burning much, maybe a quart each in ten hours, but we want to have some spare, so we need to buy some more. The FBO is all out of W80, but there is a store across the river where we can get some.

They have automotive products displayed on shelves in the reception area, but the woman at the counter knows what Aeroshell W80 is and cheerfully agrees to supply us with a case. "How much is in a case?" asks my coworker, I guess double-checking that we're not asking for some gargantuan amount.

"It's twelve bottles of point nine four six litres each," she says. right off the top of her head. This is may be the nerdiest description of a case of oil I've ever heard. You can buy a 1 litre bottle in the UK. I guess distribution is easier if they have the same size bottles and the same size cardboard boxes all over North America, so what we call one litre of oil is always 0.946 L, because that's one US quart. (The Canadian product doesn't look quite like that: the label is different and the carton is just uncoloured cardboard with the product specifications stamped on it). Maybe next time I add oil to the engine I'll write in the journey log that I added 0.946 L. Or maybe not.

Ultraprecise lady sends someone to the warehouse for a case of oil and then opens the case to assure us that we are buying what we want, even though it's stencilled on the outside of the box. I'm always impressed when suppliers understand and cater to the aviation level of paranoia. We pay for the oil and take it to the hangar where we carry out mission #2.

My colleague loads the oil into the airplane as I take photos of the front cowls. Boss is ordering new cowl plugs (to keep warmth in and birds out while parked) and needs photos so the supplier can see which sort of cowls we have. We grab a ruler off a table and take a couple of pictures with it in the shot, just in case they need the measurements, although he didn't ask for that.

While we are there, I ask the hanger's regular denizens if there has been any sign of the overnight delivery wing covers. Nope. It's only been a week and we're sitting on the 60th parallel, so why would I expect them to have arrived yet?

On Keeping Your Mouth Shut

A guy named Dustin Curtis visited the American Airlines website and found it to be a confusing and disharmonious experience. As a designer himself, he couldn't understand why a large company that sells much of its product online would have a website that looks like a cross between a Geocites homepage and a squatter's portal. So he wrote them a letter.

I don't know what Dustin expected to accomplish. Perhaps he thought that his suggestions might be welcomed and that there was a chance he could get some work out of it. I've written a similar letter to a jetshare company whose Internet image was the complete opposite of the high end professionalism the copy professed, and I just wanted to tell them. The way you might tell someone they have a taillight out. People need to know these things and don't always notice them themselves.

A member of the American Airlines design team replied to Dustin. The gist of the reply was, "I agree the site needs work; it's hard to change things in such a large company, but wait patiently and you will see." Dustin was thrilled to hear that someone cared about the site, reversed his opinion of the designers' competence and said so on his blog. An hour after he posted an anonymized version of the reply, the author of the e-mail was fired.

Ostensibly, he was fired for violating the non-disclosure agreement he signed with AA. Billy Sanez, Director of Corporate Communications at American says "We have employees all over the world using social media to communicate. The issue is not posting for us, it is revealing company secrets." What did he reveal? It's certainly no secret that AA is a large company with many departments. Were the spilled beans this list of planned improvements?

Some of our slated efforts include improved navigation; 16 column grid-based layouts; a lighter, more airy visual design; improved user interactions; and an increased transparency to fares and sales policies across the board.

How dare you reveal to our competitors that we plan to improve the user interface! I can't see that that's the real reason, though. The real sin was breaking the facade of unity in the company. That's no secret. It's so unsecret that rather than redesigning the site, AA has created three new booking portals for subdemographics. They're just as cluttered, but they think they can increase their appeal to gays, blacks and women by providing us all with separate drinking fountains. I guess if you're a black lesbian you have your pick. I can be snarky because I don't work for AA.

It doesn't matter how many coworkers you have: you don't tell the customer the landing sucked because your copilot made a lousy landing; you can't tell the charter passenger you're an hour late because management told the dispatcher to schedule two pickups at the same time; and you don't tell them the website sucks because 200 departments are fighting it out for space on the front page. It's tempting to do so, because the quickest way to get the customer off your personal back is to side with them and designate a new, common enemy to blame it all on. But you have to keep ranks.

I worked for a chief pilot once who took this one further. We kept ranks not only within the company but with the regulator, too. He forbade us to use phrases such as "Transport Canada requires you to remain seated with your seatbelt fastened." We weren't to transfer any safety demands to another organization but to make them a personal requirement by us, the flight crew, for your safety. I don't think it was a coincidence that this chief pilot had the best relationship with Transport I've ever seen. He didn't just say that we were all in it together for safety, he meant it.

But we were still free to blame everything on the weather.

Easy-Bake Pilots

There's a break in the weather and we're back to work. The outside airplanes have a thick layer of frost and snow on them, so we're glad to have had the airplane indoors. The ramp is so slippery from ice that we all come close to falling as we walk out to the airplane, even as we're all warning each other about it. I pull sideways on the towbar to straighten out the nosewheel so we can reconnect the steering scissors, but instead of the towbar turning towards me, I slide across the ramp towards it. There's not enough friction to equal the force the towbar is exerting on me.

Once again the runway surface condition report is offered as an afterthought, not part of the airport advisory on first contact with the FSS. I looked this up but I can't find anything on why I would know I had to ask for it. Today the runway is 90% ice patches, 10% bare and dry with a 65' wide centre strip sanded. No crosswind. We don't expect any trouble on take-off, and there is none.

Fresh snow on the mountains highlights their jagged shapes, like cat teeth, kind of pyramidal, but with sharp chisel marks all around. They are so like sharp bones and teeth lying there in the landscape that I imagine them to be the remains of huge mythical beasts. Or maybe I'm hallucinating from the heat. Yup, the heaters are still cranked for those finicky electronics in the back.

We fly over some high but very flat-topped plateaus (why is it tableaux but not plateaux?) I try to picture the geographic processes that formed these. I assume they were once jagged-peaked mountains too, and something ground them off. Hard to believe the same glaciers whose disappearance is being concernedly documented all over the world did this kind of thing. The plateaus are tree-covered with only a light dusting of snow. Now that I look more closely, what I thought were deciduous trees in fall colours are actually beetle-killed conifers. The deciduous trees are all bare now.

A crew calls flight services and asks them to please call Fort Simpson for them. "We're supposed to give them an hour prior notice for fuel" they explain. Someone else hears the call and asks the Fort Simpson-bound crew, "got a second for a plus five?" It was "go up a nickel" when I learned it, but funny I haven't heard that in a while. I follow them up to 126.75 MHz on the VHF radio but there's nothing juicy to report so I go back to monitoring 126.7.

It's a bright sunny day, and the sun streaming through the cockpit windows increases the temperature inside, but as the windows are blacked out in the back, it doesn't warm the electronics operating in the cargo compartment, so now we're hotter than ever, even though it's -15 degrees outside.

You probably think this is hyperbole, but it turns out it's literally baking in here. Yes, I mean literally. After landing I gather up my belongings including an uneaten snack, an apple in a plastic bag. The apple is soft to the touch and almost too hot to hold comfortably. I open the bag and it smells like fresh baked apple pie. All I need is cinnamon.

I don't know why this is a problem this winter but it never was before. The boss is working on getting a rear heater installed, so we can stop living in an easy-bake oven.

At least no one on board has swine flu, though. Here's a story showing that Air Canada would rather put a person with contagious swine flu on your flight and in your workplace than waive a flight change fee. They wanted $700 for the certified sick passenger to change her flight to a few days later, and she couldn't afford that. Could you?

Crazy Airports - Crazy Theories

Three links today, and my comments on them, with no segues connecting them.

Canada has lots of land, so lots of room for airports. Not all places that need airports are so fortunate. The airport in Gibraltar appears to be competing with surface traffic for a very small amount of flat real estate. The choices they made when painting the lines interest me. I suppose there were four possibilities: leave the intersection unpainted; paint it as a roadway; paint it as a runway; or paint it as both, with overlapping markings, like a highschool gym that is used for multiple sports. I would have chosen runway, both, neither, road, but the Gibraltar department of public works took my last choice. I'm still not entirely sure it's not photoshopped. Send me a picture of a runway that goes through a children's playground.

Commercial passenger air transport turns a hundred, dating back to the first paying passengers on zeppelins. If it hadn't been for the Hindenburg fire, I wonder how long the service would have persisted.

Humans are astoundingly good at pattern finding. We find patterns without realizing that we are finding them. We find patterns that aren't even there. And curiously, the less sense the world around us makes, the harder we look for patterns, and the more we find them, whether they are there, or even if they aren't. Every time I see a flash in my peripheral vision and identify an airplane, or a just a part of a runway and identify an airport, I'm doing this. Same with all the times I react to a half dozen birds or a wisp of cloud as if they were an airplane. False positives on detecting something that can kill you are pretty cheap.

That's it, just three links with nothing to do with one another. Unless you can see a pattern.

When It Absolutely, Positively, Has to Be There in Four Months

To help solve the deicing problem, once we no longer have access to a hangar, I asked the boss to ship us some wing covers care of the hotel. (I've also asked him to check with the Dangerous Goods guy about special permission to carry deicing fluid). He e-mails me the tracking number for the shipment, and in it he notes that he's sent them care of the FBO instead of the hotel, because it will probably be easier to get the FBO to forward them when they are late. I'm just reading an e-mail with these details when the phone rings.

It's the front desk, and they say they have a package for me. I go down to collect it. It's not wing covers. It's a smaller package. I take it back up to the room to open it.

You might remember that back in June I was in this very town, in this very hotel, preparing to go to Alaska. And one of the preparations was ordering charts for the trip. There's no such thing as overnight delivery in the north, but I figured that ten days should be enough time to receive the package. It wasn't, and I never received the charts, but another pilot had ordered them because they thought they were going to be going in a different plane, so the expedition had charts and the ones I ordered just went into limbo. I left the hotel a forwarding address, should they arrive, but I didn't ever expect to see them.

And now they are here. I'm sure they weren't six months in transit. Maybe they got stuck at the border for a couple of weeks, and then took another week or so to make it here. My theory is that the package has been sitting on a table in the hotel office and every few weeks someone looks at it and checks to see if there's a guest by that name in the hotel. When they don't find a match they shrug and leave it for someone else to deal with. But today they found a match. The turnover in hotel staff is so rapid that no one who checks the package has ever checked it before, so no one realizes the thing has been here since July. The person who called me likely assumed that it had arrived today or yesterday. And now I have it. Anyone need a set of expired Alaska charts?

The tracking number for the wing covers tells me that they went overnight to Edmonton, and are still there. I'll give them a couple of weeks. In the north "overnight" means "in about two weeks."

Honey Mustard Flavour

"Hey," I wrote in the notebook where I write such things, "Do you think I should do a blog entry about sitting in a hotel room for two days eating potato chips?"

It's autumn in the north. You really can't expect much better than low cloud, fog, snow and freezing rain. I wanted to go out for a run, but the visibility was so poor, I was afraid of getting run over. Eventually the fog lifted to about 300 feet so people could see me on the ground, so I ventured out. I didn't want to run down highway 97, the Canada-Alaska Highway, as it has no sidewalk and still a fair amount of traffic, most of it heavy trucks, so I went down a parallel street. The thing is, in a small town on the Alaska Highway there aren't many long streets that aren't the highway. My chosen street ended at works yard, but there was a dirt road going beyond that, so I followed it. For the most part the ground was frozen enough to not be squishy, but then I got to a steep downhill and dug my feet in more. They came up like hooves, encrusted in massive globs of mud that didn't fall off even when I came out at the highway and ran along the pavement for a while. When I got back to the hotel most of the mud was still there. It stuck together better than most things I've deliberately glued together. When I attempted to wash the shoes in the bathtub I discovered some quite large rocks as part of the glop.

This really is the muddiest town I've ever been in. Even if you assiduously avoid walking in the snowmobile tracks, and try to stick to the sidewalks, you can't avoid the mud. There's mud on the sidewalks and one the streets, and sidewalks keep ending so you're dumped off into the mud. It's caked on everyone's vehicles and clothes.

I go shopping, replace the frozen vegetables and stock up on Hallowe'en candy (yay Rockets!) and potato chips. And I eat them. For two days.

Passing Your Exam Again

This is probably old news to Americans, but I just came across it now. It seems that a number of FAA testing centres were not administering the full test to prospective aircraft mechanics, just passing them anyway. It's not clear to me whether the candidates paid extra to take exams they were guaranteed to pass, or whether the testing centre simply charged the normal fee and gained extra revenue by taking less time per student for the testing and attracting extra business as word of the expedited process at that testing centre spread. It's probably coincidental that a lot of this occurred in Texas, and that it was work done in Texas that was the final straw in our Person Responsible for Maintenance deciding to always fly a company mechanic out to work on our airplanes.

I have a few thoughts on this. I'm probably not as horrified as the media tells me I should be, because I don't think exams are the end-all and be-all of knowing how to fix an airplane. A newly "qualified" person is probably going to be supervised anyway, and regardless of how they was tested or how they did on the test, new personnel are going to learn lots more as they actually do the job. If someone challenged your possession of your credentials and asked you to redo your qualification tests right now, would you pass? I have to repass my proficiency test on this airplane every year, which includes an oral knowledge portion, but I wonder how well I would do on the ATPL written papers. I'll bet there are hundreds of competent Canadian pilots who couldn't pass the PSTAR right now. That's the written test on which you must score 90% before making your first solo flight, usually at around ten to twenty hours of flight time.

Taking an exam in Spanish in a predominantly Spanish-speaking area didn't sound so bad right off. The pilot might speak Spanish too, and pretty much anyone can point at a part and say "no va" or draw a diagram of their problem. I have done that with English-speaking mechanics, when my problem went beyond my vocabulary. Then I learned words like escutcheon. Sometimes the engineer has to look up the name of the part in a book. The problem comes when an esoteric part arrives with important English-language instructions that the mechanic can't properly interpret. The person also needs to be able to understand and implement ADs, not always the most clearly worded documents. The altavista babelfish isn't going to cut it there.

A lot of airplane maintenance and repair tasks are not that hard. I just changed the brake pads and hydraulic filter under supervision of an AME. There are plenty of people more mechanically inclined than I am who could diagnose and repair problems without a lot of formal training. So I don't think that the improperly tested people are going to be producing repair jobs like these, but, assuming they had the same training courses as the typical candidate, then a number of them left their training with weak areas that should have been identified and retested. What it comes down to is that when I do maintenance work an airplane, a properly certified AME watches and takes responsibility for it. If someone cheated on a test, where's the responsibility?

I would definitely like to have incompetent personnel removed from the roster of qualified aircraft repair people. But I don't believe all of the incompetents are graduates of improper testing centres, or vice versa.

More Clouds

The fog lingers a little later every day and comes sooner every evening, as does the darkness of night. This far north it is very evident that we are in the season where we turn our back on the sun. We're working too close to the hills to do night missions, so there's only time to fly one mission a day.

I call for the airport advisory and get back calm winds, no traffic. I choose the nearest runway and then the specialist asks me if I'd like the surface condition report. I'm a little irked that that wasn't considered part of the advisory. I mean, it's information about the airport that I should have to make decisions about my movements. I'd prefer it all at once, not offered as an afterthought. In this case I'm advised that the runway I have chosen is 90% bare and dry, 10% ice patches. Sounds about right. I don't change my mind and we continue to taxi for that one. There are salt crystals of some sort on the movement areas. It won't be ordinary NaCl, as that's too corrosive for use with airplanes. It must be something more exotic and expensive.

I take off and we head west. The morning fog is gone, but there is still a layer of cloud to the north. The wind is less toda, so we don't have as high an airspeed, reducing the cooling at the back, so we don't have to bake quite as hard. We're flying in the clear with the mountains to the west and the prairies to the east and the Alaska Highway and some meandering rivers snaking back and forth underneath us. On each side of us, clouds are seeping in below. Before we'd like to, it's time to call it quits.

The clouds are fairly low over the airport as I join downwind, and the terrain rises just past the riverbank. I turn around a little sooner than I might otherwise have and hook it back into line with the runway without overbanking. The weather is changing, though. We don't expect to fly tomorrow.

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Much further south, in Arizona, BLKAV8TOR2003 turned up these pictures of the results of a birdstrike. The pilot and airplane came out of it a lot better than the bird, but damn, it wouldn't have taken much to make that a tragic tie.

Freezing or Sweltering

The morning's forecast calls for freezing fog over much of he area, and the town is already enveloped in fog. I go through it to get some groceries and a layer of ice doesn't form on me, but I don't know if that's because it's not freezing fog or because I'm not an airplane.

After a few hours the fog dissipates and we go flying. A guy tows the airplane out of the hangar for us with a little tractor. It's not one of the old agricultural tractors like on the prairies, but a smaller, newer, utility tractor. It does the job.

As I watch him towing out the airplane I see an enormous raven glide over the hangar. It pauses to perch on a fence, then swoops down out of sight behind the hangar. A moment later another worker yells at the guy on the tractor, "Hey, there's a raven after your lunch!" He runs off to shoo the bird and rescue his lunch. What I couldn't see was that the raven was in the back of his truck. I'm not sure whether it was opening his lunch box--they're certainly crafty enough to do that--or just tearing open shopping bags. I'm certain that birds like that understand the concept of swiping stuff as opposed to finding your own, because they steal from one another all the time and go chasing after the thief, gronking loudly. But do they know that the things in cars and trucks are ours? I bet they do. I think they know perfectly well that lunchboxes are not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and that they will annoy us by taking food from them, just as they annoy wolves by "sharing" their kills too. But that's what they do. My airplane takes 100LL. Ravens take your lunch. Local legend asserts that Raven stole the sun, so a few sandwiches constitute very petty larceny.

The engines are happy with their fresh oil and overnight hangar stay, so we're on our way after conditioning the new brake pads. We crank up the heat in the airplane for the computers in the back, but because some of the electronics are in the rear of the airplane, designed as a cargo compartment, we are sweltering in order to have enough heat back there to keep the computers going. I lay my arm against the cold exterior window and pour some of my drinking water into my bra in an attempt to cool off. It varies between -10 and -15 outside, and apparently it's only 15 degrees at the back, but it's like a sauna in the cockpit.

There is some fog still on the ground west of town. It gradually vanishes during the flight, but it's forecast to come in worse tonight, so we finish our day before dark and put the airplane back in the hangar.

Back at the hotel I'm ready for a delicious fresh salad, but a minor tragedy awaits me. My fridge is too cold. I have all the ingredients for a very very crisp salad. Everything is frozen. The lettuce is delicate crunchy like autumn leaves. I rinse it under the tap and the entire package reduces to a double handful of mush, like cooked spinach. The cucumber is so solid that at first I think it's okay, but it thaws to mush. I don't even think a raven would eat it.

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Here's a weird accident report. Anyone familiar with CRJ systems have an idea how this could happen the way the pilot said it did?

Discovered on the Airport PA

Peter Mansbridge, a respected Canadian broadcaster, has just been awarded the Order of Canada. I wouldn't have remarked on this, or any other OC appointments were it not for how Peter got his start in broadcasting. Apparently at the age of 19 he was slinging bags for Transair, a small airline in northern Manitoba, and a CBC employee who heard his voice on the airport PA offered him a job at the radio station.

But why was he in Churchill working for a local airline? Most young people working in any capacity at a northern airline base are pilots or wannabe pilots. Is Peter Mansbridge a pilot? He probably wanted to be. The Canadian Encyclopedia says he flunked out of Navy pilot training. He wasn't even a customer service agent, he was a cargo handler, filling in on the PA for someone who was off sick. This anecdote suggests that he can recognize an engine failure without freaking out, but the same is probably true of many seasoned travellers.

I don't even know if that's true. It's more likely to be so than this version of the same story, which I found in an intership newsletter.

Mansbridge became instead an air force pilot until, after hearing his voice over the radio, someone hired him to open the CBC`s first post in Churchill, MB.

Air Force/Navy ... pilot/flunked out ... radio/PA ... it's all the same, right?

Don't you wish you were looking for a job in 1975? I have heard so many stories of the seventies when people with minimal qualifications got jobs because they gave someone else a ride to work, or were delivering something, or doing something else almost entirely unrelated within sight of someone who worked there. The availability of good jobs in the seventies is why that generation thinks my generation are all slackers, and don't understand why we roll our eyes when they tell us how hard they worked to be where they are.

Not that I doubt Peter Mansbridge is good at his job. And I think he did work hard to be noticed. To be where he is, he not only has to do a good job of telling the news, but an exceptional job at politics and interpersonal relations. I would probably be at an airline if I had half his people skills. And he probably wouldn't be an officer of the Order of Canada if he were flying for Air Canada today.

Lest We Forget

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Excerpt from In Flanders Fields
by Lt.-Col. John McCrae
(1872 - 1918)

When I was a kid, we used to watch elderly veterans in the Remembrance Day parade and think that one day the there would be no war veterans left to march, and then eventually no one left at all who remembered the Canadians who fought and died in wars. We didn't know, as kids, that there would always be more wars, ensuring a steady supply of veterans.

The Veterans Affairs timeline doesn't include it, but today you don't need a memory longer than a fortnight to remember fallen Canadian soldiers. We will hear nothing about the war for a few weeks, and then learn about the deaths of more of our soldiers. We see their pictures. As I page through the photos of the fallen, I wonder what they tell the recruits as they get photographed in front of the flag there. I don't think the army has a yearbook. An ID photo would be just the face. Do they know as they pose that this is the photo that will be released to the press if they are killed in action? Is there some other less macabre internal purpose to these nicely posed photos?


I can barely imagine flying that biplane, but I'd love to have a go, so long as I didn't have to go to war in one. I don't even like playing violent video games.
I like that they are carrying bicycles ashore for this landing. I wonder if there's anything that would be different about the modern airplane had the first airplane entrepreneurs not been bicycle mechanics.
The Veterans Affairs Canada does a good job explaining how and why Canadians observe Remembrance Day on November eleventh. It's a day to remember all soldiers who fought in all wars. The website also has a page full of photos to download, specifically for blogs and personal websites, but it's a little awkward to use because there are no thumbnails and not very descriptive names of the photo sets, just zipfiles. The photos on this page are from there, so I don't know who the people are, or where they were serving. I can tell by the filenames that the men with the horse and airplane are from the first world war, the beach landing is from the second world war and the colour photos are modern publicity stills.